Media Industry Studies

Daniel Herbert, Amanda D. Lotz, Aswin Punathambekar

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509537792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

The study of media industries has become a thriving subfield of media studies. It already comprises a diverse intellectual history, a range of fascinating questions and topics, and many theoretical and methodological frameworks. Media Industry Studies provides the roadmap to this vibrant area of study. Blending a comprehensive overview of foundational literature with an examination of the varied scales and sites media industry studies have considered, the book explores connections among research questions, topics, and methodologies. It includes examples from many media industries – film, television, journalism, music, games – and incorporates emerging scholarship considering the industrial contexts of social and internet-distributed media. Offering an account of the intellectual traditions and approaches that have defined the subfield to date, Media Industry Studies is an indispensable resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.

1
The Origins of Media Industry Studies

Having sketched out the overarching goals of this book, we turn our attention now to outlining an intellectual history of this new subfield. Although media industry studies has been instrumental over the last fifteen years or so in bringing a new prominence to matters of media production and circulation, industry dynamics and practices, and capitalism and cultural production, it is by no means unique in its academic concerns with the subjects of media industries and institutions. It is also, not surprisingly, methodologically and conceptually indebted to a range of both earlier and more recent developments in media theory as well as scholarship in closely allied fields, including critical race theory, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies. Our primary goal in this chapter, however, is to situate media industry studies within a global history of media studies and in doing so, to outline key theoretical influences and points of departure.

The study of media industries has always been part of the examination of the power that media wield on cultures and societies. Not surprisingly, the operations of media industries have particularly attracted academic attention during moments of dramatic change – whether socio-political or technological. This research has been rooted in different disciplines at different moments and in different places – sociology, communication, political economy, cultural studies, film history, critical theory – and, consequently, has not been regarded as being part of a larger and coherent intellectual enterprise. In fact, through much of the late twentieth century, we can trace multiple, and even competing, strands of media industry study. The formation of a coherent enterprise identifying as media industry studies at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century builds on the diverse work that came before.

An early suggestion of the need for a media industry perspective can be found in a 1991 article by Jeremy Tunstall, who dates the first macro industrial approach of media research to Max Weber in 1910. Roots of media industry studies can be identified throughout the 1920s, when scholars turned to the workings of the cultural industries in order to answer questions about culture and its fraught links with the economy, politics, and society. Although predominantly remembered as early textual and audience effects studies, the Payne Fund studies in the United States (1929 to 1932) that examined the effect of movies on children sought an industrial solution through the creation of a set of moral guidelines known as the Hays Code. During this decade in Western Europe, the Institute for Social Research was established in Germany (1923) and became the center for the cultural turn within Marxist thinking that explored how the power of culture might explain the acceptance of class-based subjugation. Thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School examined the social and cultural significance of film and music, among other media and arts, and included analyses of production, textual form, and audiences in their accounts.

The more commonly acknowledged starting point for media industry study is the 1940s, with the continued efforts to explain propaganda and its effects in society. Paddy Scannell (2007) notes that Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, who are commonly associated with the establishment of US effects and persuasion research, established a “critique of the media as soft disciplinary agents of the economic and social status quo” in postwar America (72). Two relevant research trajectories emerged at this time. Lazarsfeld built from the concerns about media effects that were the basis of the Payne Fund studies, but also engaged in a considerable amount of media industries research, in this case in the service of government and corporate sponsors. The trajectory of research Lazarsfeld inspired has been distinguished as “administrative” research because of its aims in advancing the industry’s knowledge about itself for strategic purposes.

This administrative tradition contrasted with the critical perspective toward media industries found in the research of the Frankfurt School, and most famously in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s 1944 manifesto on “The Culture Industry” – although there was co-mingling among administrative and critical researchers at the time. “The Culture Industry” explicitly critiqued the phenomenon of mass culture, which was understood as culture created for the masses, not the culture created of the people, and used industrialized methods of mass production and sales. Importantly, as early as the 1940s – if not the 1920s – we see scholars recognizing the power of media in society not simply in the films, radio broadcasts, and media of the time – but looking to the creators of media, be they individuals or institutions, and seeking to understand industrial motivations to produce particular types of content.

Two notable studies from the 1940s examined the workers and internal business structures of the American film industry from sociological and anthropological perspectives in order to better understand how work practices and production cultures might impact the form and content of movies. Leo Rosten’s 1941 book Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers grew out of the author’s sociological training and interest in the social effect of movies, as well as his experience as a screenwriter in the late 1930s. The book draws upon copious empirical research, including “interviews, questionnaires … government statistics, market data, and casual observation of media elites” (Sullivan, 2009). Focusing particularly upon “above the line” workers such as “producers, actors, directors, and writers,” Rosten’s study offers a rich portrait and critical analysis of Hollywood’s internal social organization and culture. Similarly, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker sought to better understand Hollywood’s influence on individuals and American society by looking at the practices and beliefs of American film workers. Her book, Hollywood: The Dream Factory (1950) draws upon a year of fieldwork in Los Angeles that included interviews and observation to provide a rigorous ethnography and analysis of the social system organizing film production in Hollywood. Though Powdermaker is quick to suggest that Hollywood films are escapist fantasies, she crucially takes the norms, mores, and myths of Hollywood workers seriously, and provides a deep sense of how such beliefs influence industrial organization and practice and, in the end, movie content.

During this period, Harold Innis’s work in the Canadian context marked another key intervention in our understanding of media and power by focusing attention on the historical study of technologies of communication. An economic historian by training, Innis’s initial research on the history of trade in Canada (fur, fishing, and timber) led to a focus on the economic and political implications of transport and communication. As Scannell points out, Innis’s discovery that the Canadian Pacific railroad “overlaid the routes of the old fur trade” marked the beginnings of his interest in how empires and nations manage and control vast territories, and the crucial role of communications technologies in the exercise of imperial and national hegemony. In Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), Innis offers a sweeping historical account of oral and literate cultures, the biases inherent in different technologies, and goes on to argue that space-biased media (more ephemeral media that spread widely at the time of creation but do not endure) were crucial to the consolidation of political power.

Broad claims aside, the significance of Innis’s work for media industry studies lies in his focus on the material and political dimensions of media and communication technologies. Innis’s work encourages us first and foremost to consider how media are recorded, stored, and circulated, and then to ponder the link between these processes and state and corporate power. It is not surprising that this line of thinking, one that brings together economic history, politics, and cultural geography, inspired theory building in the 1970s that began analyzing the ways in which Western dominance of the production and circulation of media shored up new forms of hegemony and the rise of American empire in the post-World War II era.

An influential body of scholarship began highlighting the fact that a large number of developing nations had to import news and entertainment programs from the developed West and, in the process, also imported powerful representations and values of capitalist consumer culture. Analysis by Herbert Schiller (1969), Armand Mattelart and Ariel Dorfman (1975), Oliver Boyd-Barrett (1977), Dallas Smythe (1977; 1981), and others directed a line of critique not only at the tradition of “administrative” research in mass communication-oriented departments across the United States but also toward “development communication,” an influential area of research that focused attention on links between media and national development. The idea of development was straightforward – media could be used as vehicles for moving newly independent countries across the Global South toward the free market-oriented political economic model of the developed West. However, this perspective set up Western standards as an uncritiqued ideal.

While theories of dependency and cultural imperialism gained ground, the work of Latin-American scholars proved crucial for resisting the influence of the decidedly Anglocentric development communication framework. Using a neo-Marxist perspective that foregrounded capitalism and structural inequality as starting points for understanding international communications, Mattelart (1976) and others argued that transnational corporations based in the Global North brought the economies of postcolonial nations into a web of inter-dependency. The economic and geopolitical relations set in place had led to a highly exploitative dependency model that ensured the dominance of the Western “core” and left “peripheral” countries on the margins of the global economy. Latin American scholars took the lead in developing this body of scholarship and emphasized that media companies based in the Anglophone West were, in fact, the beneficiaries of “development” and “modernization” projects, and that creating new markets for their products across South America, Africa, and Asia was, in the end, the main goal. We delve into the complexities of this phase of media and communications research in greater detail later in this book, but for now, let us simply note that research on the media industries – newspaper and radio in particular – was central to fierce scholarly and public debates on the role of media, information, and communications in the emerging post-World War II world order.

The developments chronicled thus far are arguably categorized as a pre-history to the expansive and pluriform explosion of media industry study that emerges from the socio-political events and conditions at the end of the 1960s. Also of note during this period, structuralism and semiology increasingly dominated scholarship about film and media, which provided a method to study the ways in which media texts create meaning. Importantly, structuralism provided an alternative to the more impressionistic forms of “film appreciation” or auteur theory by attempting to study film and media with scientific rigor. Film studies rarely considered the industrialized mechanics of its production, while questions of “film form” gave way to analyses of film as a “language,” with discernable properties and organizing principles. Scholars working within these textual traditions maintained an interest in media power, but located that power within discourse, form, and language and less within the institutions that make media.

From the Cauldron of the Late 1960s

While the period around 1968 is widely remembered as a significant inflection point and moment of social change in many parts of the globe, the importance of this period for establishing multiple trajectories of media industry study is less well known. The social and political upheaval of the time led many in search of ways to understand the operation of power in society, and the role of communication and media in that operation. Multiple structures for understanding the role of media industries emerged, although, instead of recognizing the common interests that could unite them, for the most part, these intellectual trajectories coexisted with little exchange, and in some cases, interactions were hostile when exchange occurred.

The social and political unrest of the late 1960s provided the seed that generated the three trajectories of thought that prepared the emergence of a coherent media industry studies in the early 2000s: critical political economy, cultural studies, and new historicism in film studies. Notably, all of these research traditions emerge out of a larger ferment involving the re-framing of Marxism but otherwise chart markedly different courses.

Critical Political Economy Approaches

Critical political economy approaches to the study of media and communication developed from a belief that control of media systems was a vital part of how institutions and ideologies sustain their power. Much of the research into this approach focuses on understanding how political and economic power in societies is maintained by examining the use of technological and institutional communication infrastructures.

Questions of empire, in particular, American imperialism in relation to the role of media in national development in the mid 1960s, were a key initial driver of critical political economy’s approach to examining the role of media systems in maintaining structures of power. These concerns led to the set of recommendations produced by UNESCO to improve global media known as the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in the 1970s. The broader context of concern developed following the wave of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s and the ensuing struggles faced by postcolonial nations to set up, or, in some cases, reform, their media industries. Critical political economy analysis addressed many of the central problems of media operation, including the narrow and rare attention to what were then conceived of as “Third World” contexts in Western media and the challenges these countries faced in developing their own media institutions. While there were clear material developmental concerns and cultural implications of content issues, such as minimal and disaster-focused news coverage, critical political economy and understanding of the commercial and public funding structures helped explain these content patterns. This strand of analysis is connected intimately to the “dependency theory” that develops out of the Latin American context (Mattelart and Dorfman, 1975) and remains strong well into the early 1980s.

Critical political economy also could account for the “west to rest” pattern of media flow that drew concern about the advancement of Western hegemony and stymying of indigenous production. Such patterns arose from industrial structures such as the large and relatively affluent US domestic market that enabled the selling of US media goods around the globe at costs far less than those incurred in the original production (Schiller, 1969).

This research into global empire and inequity in media, which focuses on a macro level of research and investigates international flows of capital and politics, is characteristic of the level of analysis explored in Chapter 6. Critical political economy approaches often focus on this macro scale, but were also used to investigate the practices and dynamics within particular media institutions in the 1970s. A critical political economy approach provides a key foundation for research characteristic of other levels, especially the organizational level considered in Chapter 4. Much of this scholarship emerges from sociologists who take methodologies of observation and interview into media organizations – primarily those producing news in the UK and US – to answer questions about how and why the news comes to take its typical form. A body of scholarship about newsroom organizations emerged in parallel from sociologists, who examined media entities as organizations, though not always with the same Marxist underpinnings (Gans, 1979; Hirsch, 1972; Peterson, 1982). Whether it was Herbert Gans, who examined US newsmaking at CBS, NBC, Newsweek and Time, or Philip Schlesinger (1978), who investigated the newsmaking process in the BBC, this branch of scholarship investigated how power operates within newsrooms as organizations by considering issues such as the practices that incentivize journalists toward a set of behaviors and the routines that likewise structure newsgathering and reporting. As Stephen Reese (2009) argues: “This approach moves away from treating news as a question of bias and embeds it in the ongoing activities of organizations” (280). In contrast to assumptions that simplistically afforded the publisher the power to decide what is news, this tradition explored the inner workings of the organizations, their structures of power, and daily rou...